ABSTRACT
Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007) is an unusually inventive and imaginative biographical film. It is, in the words of the opening credits, “Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan.” Fitting the metaphorical announcement that it will cover “many lives,” the film presents a living star subject who is absent, multiple, elusive and in the most daring portrayal, dead. I’m Not There reimagines Bob Dylan with six different actors. Each of the actors symbolically represent a different Dylan career-phase or interest: Marcus Carl Franklin plays Woody, an African American boy, who represents Dylan’s little-known childhood, his interest in social politics, and the work of Woody Guthrie; Ben Whishaw is Arthur Rimbaud, a poet admired by Dylan, who shared his commitment to the ideal of individual artistic creation; Christian Bale appears as both Jack Rollins, an aspiring folk singer similar to the Dylan of the early 1960s, and later as Pastor John, evoking the born-again Dylan of the late 1970s and early 1980s; Heath Ledger plays Robbie, who divorces his wife in the late 1970s, much like Dylan, and voices his ambivalent relationship to stardom; Richard Gere is Billy the Kid, approximating a time of reclusion in the 1970s; and finally, Cate Blanchett 228appears as Jude Quinn, the embodiment of Dylan I will focus on in this chapter. Quinn resembles the Dylan of the mid-1960s, when he produced his most legendary albums and appeared in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary, Don’t Look Back (1967). Nearly as surprising as the appearance of Dylan in these remarkably different bodies, and just as central to Haynes’s critical take on the genre, is the presentation of Dylan as a corpse at the beginning of the film.
